Tennessee basketball top five in recruiting, retaining talent combination

Everybody talks about the transfer portal and recruiting, but it’s still as true as ever that the best metric for success the following season is a combination of returning talent and success from the previous season. Tennessee basketball fits that perfectly.

UT won the SEC Tournament Championship for the first time in over 40 years and reached the NCAA Tournament Round of 32. As a result, the success is clearly there. In terms of returning talent, well, it stacks up nicely against other teams.

Jeff Borzello of ESPN ranked UT No. 12 in the nation in terms of talent retained this year. Despite losing their leading scorer in Kennedy Chandler and two of their three rotational post players in John Fulkerson and Brandon Huntley-Hatfield, they return lots of key players.

The Vols have their most efficient player, Santiago Vescovi, and their most versatile player, Josiah-Jordan James, both back. Those are their second and third leading scorers. Zakai Zeigler, their fourth leading scorer and co-starter at point guard with Chandler, is also back.

Add in the return of Olivier Nkamhoua, who started most of last year before going down with a season-ending injury, and Uros Plavsic, another rotational post player, and UT has a starting five worth of returning talent. That offsets their seven losses, which also included the transfers of Victor Bailey Jr., Justin Powell, Handje Tamba and Quentin Diboundje.

You all know that, though. What really stands out about Borzello’s ranking and last year’s success is how it coincides with what’s coming in. Of the 11 teams ahead of Tennessee basketball in that ranking, only three are ahead of the Vols in any recruiting ranking: The Indiana Hoosiers, Virginia Cavaliers and North Carolina Tar Heels.

However, Indiana is the only team consistently ahead of the Vols in any ranking, so when you combine that with the two most important factors, you’ve got a team that’s definitely top five, maybe top two. That should bode well for the program going forward.

Adding a five-star like Justin Phillips and a four-star like D.J. Jefferson late in the game certainly helps UT, especially when four-star B.J. Edwards was already part of the program. Three-star Tobe Awaka reclassifying only further fuels that.

Beyond Phillips’ ability to just be plugged into the lineup, there’s also a collection of talented players who were in the system last year and should take a huge leap forward this year, specifically Jahmai Mashack and Jonas Aidoo. Borzello couldn’t even account for them, but given Rick Barnes’ track record of developing talent, they should count.

To be fair, Barnes doesn’t have the best track record of fusing new talent with returning talent. In 2014-15, the Texas Longhorns were coming off a 24-win season and had reached the Round of 32. They returned pretty much everybody and also added five-star Myles Turner.

Barnes and co. stumbled that year to a 20-14 first-round exit from the Big Dance, and he was then fired, which ironically landed him the Vols job in the first place. There’s also the transfer portal factor, which doesn’t come into play here.

As a result, this even on paper doesn’t suggest Tennessee basketball is a top five team. However, it’s a good start, and even in the portal, they did add a key scorer in Tyreke Key, so fueling this with help in the portal and the hidden returning talent is a great sign going forward on Rocky Top.